Nantucket man vs. 7-foot shark: Man wins

Author(s):

O’ryan Johnson

A 24-year-old surf fisherman hooked, wrestled, and dragged a seven-foot sand shark up the beach Sunday on Nantucket after a 45-minute battle.

“I was covered in sweat. You get an adrenaline rush, and then it wears off and they you get tired,” Elliot Sudal said from his job at Nantucket Moorings yesterday. “There was a crowd of people around yelling.”

Sudal, originally from Connecticut, moved here four months ago from Florida and was fishing with his vacationing cousins Sunday when he said he noticed several of their blue fish catches were coming out with shark bites.

“I had my shark gear with me so I went and got that,” Sudal said. “I had half a blue fish. I threw him on there. I only tossed it out there 10 or 15 feet or so, which was right where the waves break. People don’t realize there are so many of those around. I hooked into four of them that night. After I threw it out, I had him on the line in two minutes.”

Sudal said he’s done this hundreds of times in Florida and managed to land a shark on the beach before throwing it back. He said the trick is to tire the shark out, reel it into the shallow surf and then jump in and grab him. It was a contest that night to see who would tire first, a predator made of pure muscle using every instinct honed by millions of years of evolution to escape its snare, or Sudal, the angler.

“They’re really strong,” he said. “They get a little adrenaline rush, once they realize something crazy is happening. Then you grab them and they start freaking out. Sometimes you gotta jump on.”

The danger, he said, is that once you get into the water with the shark you can easily lose a hand or a foot trying to bring it to shore, so he targets the tail. He said he taught himself the technique, but it has worked every time. This, however, is the first time, he’s attracted so much attention.

“I’ve done this hundreds of times in Florida and its no big deal,” he said. “I do it once here and I’m on TV.”

Still, he said, thanks to his cousins’ pictures, the attention has attracted a lot of fans on Facebook, which he said isn’t a bad thing for a single guy on Nantucket. He said up until now, now the most attention he’s attracted is from his landlord and her friends who share his fish catches.

“I probably supply all the 55-year-old women on the island with stripped bass,” he said.